falling asleep in warzones
by heroisms
Summary: Eventually, Bruce comes home. (post-aou, not canon compliant)


Like a lot of brucenat folks, I've loved this ship since the first Avengers film, am thrilled that my tiny rarepair is canon, and am somewhat less thrilled with the execution in making this ship canon. This is my attempt at finding a middle ground between how Whedon interprets brucenat & how I do. Endless amounts of thanks to both of my incredible beta readers, tumblr users catelyn-starks & jemmmasfitz, for giving me feedback and encouragement on this fic, & helping me make it the fic it is now.

Title from a quote by Lang Leav.

* * *

Bruce doesn't send a postcard, not at first. But Natasha is willing to wait. Not for Bruce, so much as what he represents, the idea of choosing something, choosing someone, for herself. She's spent her whole life waiting for this, in one way or another, her golden chance at something better. Bruce was better.

A week after she'd given up on hearing from him, Bruce sends one. It's from Australia, a rock formation reaching towards the heavens and nothing but sand for miles. _Natasha_ , the card reads, each letter of her name careful, precise. _I'm so sorry for everything. Bruce._

Natasha is sorry about a lot of things, but she thinks that trying to make something work with Bruce isn't one.

He sends a couple of postcards over the next month, nothing fancy. _Natasha_ , they all start, before the handwriting starts sloping and rushing. Islamabad; _I'm not sorry I left, but I'm sorry I hurt you_. Vilnius; _I miss you every day_. Kuala Lumpur; _I don't know what's scarier about coming home: not knowing if we'll know how to forgive each other, or knowing I've started thinking of somewhere as home._

It's cute, in a weepy, sentimental sort of way. She keeps them all, keeps them hidden; the last thing she needs is Steve needling her about growing soft, or worse, talking to her about Bruce. She hasn't gone soft. Caring isn't the weakness she once mistook it for, it's just a different kind of strength.

The postcards don't make her feel much better about anything, but they say that Bruce still cares too, that he isn't dead, that he doesn't want to let go all the way. That's something.

* * *

The two things Natasha likes best about Sam are that he can tell the difference between when it's time to ask and when it's time to shut the hell up, and that he knows how to take a punch. The rest of the team is pretty good for the latter but shit at the former; Steve won't quit pushing her until he gets the answers he wants, and the rest of them are still too wary of her to even try to get her talking. Sam, though. Sam has it figured out.

It's been three weeks since Bruce's last card and three hours since she started going toe to toe with a punching bag when Sam leaves his own bag to stand in the way of hers.

"Take a shower, Romanoff. We're getting coffee. I'm buying."

"I don't think I'm done punching things just yet," Natasha smiles blandly, just for the look on Sam's face.

"Better believe I'm done watching you make an embarrassment of me over here. You can talk about what's bothering you over coffee like a real person, or you can see if taking a few more swings will make you feel any better, but I'm willing to bet the bag won't buy you coffee after."

"I'm ordering something expensive," Natasha warns, already heading for the showers.

"Gotta use that Avengers salary for something!"

Natasha wasn't sure if she really wanted to talk or not, but she figured she could decide that when she was holding the coffee she'd been promised. As always, Sam left the ball in her court. He people watched while he nursed his iced coffee, waiting to see what conversation she wanted to have.

"I don't need to talk about this," Natasha says eventually. She outlived the Cold War; she's not interested in wasting time seeing who can hold their silence longer.

"Talk about what?" Sam keeps watching passerbys, Natasha watches the reflection of a family of four in his sunglasses.

"You're going to have to try harder than that."

"Okay," Sam grins. "I can play hardball. If I tell you a completely humiliating story about how I audibly sighed last week when Steve took off his shirt and how Rhodey definitely heard it, will you tell me what's up? Intel trade."

Natasha would, but, "Rhodey already told me. Your old intel isn't worth shit, Wilson."

"I've got a name on that woman Rhodey's been seeing."

"So he's not fooling around with Tony and Pepper, then?" Natasha asks, mostly to see the pleased, scandalized look on Sam's face.

"Didn't even realize that was on the table."

She shrugs. "It's happened before."

Sam grins but moves on, and Natasha can already tell she'll be getting hell from Rhodey about this sometime soon "Her name is Carol," Sam says, back on track. He was annoyingly persistent once he had his eye on something, and it would be infuriating if he wasn't so likeable and respectful about it. "She's military, Air Force. It's how they met."

"Does Carol have a last name?"

"Are you going to run a background check?" Sam counters.

Natasha gives him the slow grin she saves for interrogations. "With or without a surname."

"Danvers," Sam admits. "Now you owe me."

"It's Bruce," Natasha says. She feels rubbed raw and exposed by offering him a truth, but Sam doesn't look at her any differently. "I guess I miss him."

"You're telling me that between you and Stark you couldn't figure out how to track him down?"

"I've already betrayed his trust enough," Natasha says shortly. "I can let him come back on his own terms."

* * *

A week later, there is a postcard from Kigali, one of the silverback gorillas the country is famous for. She is sure Bruce didn't take the time to see them. _Natasha,_ it reads, _see you soon_. She knows that she will. Bruce can take care of himself; he's just taking his time making his way home.

It's two days after that, just when she has started to wonder when _soon_ will be, when Natasha gets off the elevator and finds Bruce sitting on the couch of her living room.

"Bruce," she says, and doesn't move. The elevator doors close behind her, Bruce looks away from his clasped hands and up at her. He's only been gone three months, but somehow he looks even more of a mess than when he left. His hair is growing wild and he's grown a beard, the shadows under his eyes look like a pair of shiners, and his jeans are worn at the knees. He looks wonderful, like nothing she's ever seen.

"I hope this is okay," Bruce begins. He pushes up off her couch and runs a hand through his hair. "Friday let me in."

"How was Rwanda?"

"I was in Goma last, actually. Doing some support work at Panzi Hospital. I crossed into Rwanda to send you that. International postage isn't what you would hope in the DRC." He pushes both hands in pockets, takes half a step forward. There is enough time for her to take a breath and let it go before he speaks again. "So, I take it you've been getting my postcards?"

"I wasn't expecting you to come back this quickly."

"Well," Bruce laughs a little, in that self-deprecating way he's always had, that makes him the butt of all his own jokes. "Atonement in exile isn't quite what it used to be."

"Not many things are anymore."

"No. No, they really aren't."

Natasha watches Bruce carefully, like he's the flight risk he'd been when they first met. They've both changed a lot since then, both changed a lot since SHIELD picked them up. She'd like to think that neither of them are the disasters they once were, that they were both done cutting and running for a while. She'd like to think she's right about a lot of the things she thinks of Bruce.

"So what are things like now?" Natasha asks finally. She's waited long enough for her answers.

"I suppose you wouldn't be too impressed if I said that was up to you."

"Not so much."

"All the same," Bruce shrugs. "I'm waiting on you, Natasha. Tell me I don't have a place here anymore and I'll be gone."

Natasha is quiet for a long moment. She doesn't want to make Bruce's choices for him, won't ever do that to him again, any more than she wants anyone making any of hers. Between the two of them, it was about time they got a chance at self-determination. It had been a long while since they'd had the luxury of making their own choices.

"And if I said you did have a place here?"

Bruce holds his hands open, like he's trying to prove he has no secrets left to hide. Natasha doesn't believe it. People like Bruce, people like her, didn't know how to let go all of their secrets. You run long enough, you wear your secrets like ribs, last line of defense before the heart.

"Then I stay."

"Is there a place for you here, Bruce?"

"There's no place in the world for me. For _him._ "

Natasha laughs; there's nothing funny about any of this.

"There's nowhere I'm not a liability. I'm a bomb in a crowd, Natasha, no matter where I am."

"Then why did you come back at all?"

"Because, if there were a place for me anywhere," Bruce says, steady and certain like he only is when he's explaining the moving parts of the universe, "I'd want it to be beside you."

She takes a while to respond. Truths are heavy things, and Bruce's are all the heavier, for how sparingly they are given. "I don't know what to say to that," she tells him finally, returning his honesty with her own.

Bruce shrugs. He's tense, wound so tight she can imagine him vibrating like struck piano wire, and the gesture is a stilted, shuffling thing. It's so very Bruce that it nearly pains her. She's missed him, more than she had realized. "I don't know if you need to say anything. I just figured, after all this, the least I owed you was the truth."

That, Natasha thinks, is enough.

* * *

Rebuilding things is not easy, but Natasha had never done things because they were easy. She had done them because they were what she had been told to do, then because they were what she needed to do in recompense. Now, she is her own, with no Red Room or SHIELD or Hydra to pull her strings and send her on her way. A year later, it is still terrifying.

She's not a hero, for all that she may be superhuman, but she's not a tool either, anymore. She's just Natasha. Her gun feels heavier in her hands, she thinks, when she is the one choosing to pull the trigger.

Bruce doesn't have the luxury of that distinction.

"How many?" he asks, a day after his return. He has settled into a room and slept like the dead, but now that he is returned and awake, he is intent on digging open his wounds.

"604," Natasha tells, and Bruce winces like she'd spat in his face. "Between South Africa, South Korea, and Sokovia, 604 casualties, altogether."

Bruce swears and lets his breath out in a hiss.

"Ask me how many people we saved," Natasha demands. If this is how he is going to be, she wants a fight, wants to see his teeth. She is not interested in letting Bruce find new reasons just to hate himself, when they both know better than to think he is to blame. She wants to push at him until he pushes back, wants to make Bruce see all the complicated truths he's been running from.

"How many?"

"We saved the lives of 7.3 billion people. Tell me that doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters, Natasha. It does. But does it make up for it?"

"What are you upset about? The fact that we couldn't save everyone, or that I did what I had to in order to save as many as we could?"

"Pretty words," Bruce growls, "to say that you pretended that I had a choice, and then you took it away from me."

"I don't know if I believe," Natasha says slowly, trying each individual word out for size, "that there even are choices for people like us at the end of the world."

"Bullshit," Bruce snaps.

Natasha cuts him off. "What I mean, is that I don't think there is a choice, not when people are going to die if you walk away."

"You chose to push me. You chose to betray my trust. You chose to use me like I was some sort of guided wrecking ball."

"Yes," Natasha says, and she is sorry that she did all of those things, but she doesn't know if she could apologize. She knows herself, and she knows that if the world was ending all over again, she would make the same choices all over again. "I'm not sorry about what I did, but I am sorry that I hurt you."

"I just thought," Bruce murmurs, "that of all people, you would understand how that feels."

"I do. You know that."

He laughs and looks at her like she's endlessly frustrating and endlessly fascinating and like she's something wonderful, all at the same time. He wears the saddest smile she's seen in a long while when he asks, "Then why did you do it?"

"We had a job to finish," she tells him. She's careful with her words because she wants to say this right. They're both monsters, that's part of the appeal, but that's not all they have to be. No use in pretending anyone is ever just one thing, but no use in pretending to not be what you are, either. "You're not just the monster. Sometimes you're a hero, too."

* * *

"I didn't come back to be an Avenger," is the first thing Bruce says when he sees Steve.

"Welcome back," is all Steve says in return.

Bruce had chosen to greet everyone at once, just get it all over with, so he'd just followed Natasha down to the facility cafeteria and sat down with the Avengers for dinner.

"I mean it," Bruce insists, turning his entire focus on Steve. "I can't do that anymore. I can't feel like a trained attack dog on a leash. No more Code Greens."

"What about end of the world scenarios?" Steve asks.

"If the world's really ending? Doesn't seem like the Other Guy will give me much of a choice."

Natasha pushes him into a seat with a hand on his shoulder and sits down beside him, staring at Steve the whole while like she's daring him to fight her on this one. She's not thrilled about Bruce's decision, personally; she is still detached and strategic enough to know that without Thor and without Bruce the new team is seriously in need of some blunt force. But she meant it when she promised to give him agency before anything else. If this was going to work between them, promises had to be kept and boundaries had to be respected.

"Either way," Steve says, leaning over the cafeteria table to clasp hands with Bruce, "It's good to see you again, Bruce."

"Likewise."

Across the table, Sam starts making suggestive faces at her and Bruce, while Rhodey strikes up a conversation about design improvements on his suit. Vision doesn't eat from where he is peering closely at Bruce, and Wanda will not look at anyone as she explains the idea behind Eurovision to Steve, but there is something real here, a sense of community that was found instead of created. Wanda looks up to laugh at a joke Steve makes and Rhodey starts cackling when he sees Sam's face, and Natasha realizes with no small satisfaction that they're starting to feel like a team.

* * *

It takes time to figure out what works.

Which is okay, they have time. It's a new luxury, and the both of them are still getting a feel for that as much as they are feeling out the tentative thing they're building for themselves. Learning a new person is never easy doing, but it's even harder when you're relearning yourself at the same time.

"Listen," Bruce says, a month after he comes back, "it's about sex."

Sex, for Natasha, is just another job. It doesn't bother her but it's nothing she seeks out, isn't something she's ever had much personal interest in to speak of.

"I'm not interested in sex," she says immediately, just to cut the conversation off at the knees. "It's just not something that I want or need, or that carries all that much meaning for me."

"Okay," he smiles widely, eyes crinkling at the corners. "I'm not either. Interested, I mean. Not really willing to take the risk on something that I'm fine without."

Natasha smiles back at him, and slips her toes under his thigh. She has persistently cold feet and Bruce runs warm, and she doesn't really think she needs a reason to touch Bruce anyways.

They put their expectations on the table and it's easier after that. Bruce needs his own space just as much as Natasha needs hers, so sometimes they don't see each other for days, and sometimes Bruce sleeps beside her in her oversized bed, and most times they are somewhere in between. Bruce figures out how Natasha takes her coffee and when she gets back to New York after tough missions he'll let her lie her head in his lap and keep his questions quiet, and in return she is as honest with him as she knows how to be.

It doesn't always work, but it mostly does and it is good and it is theirs. Most of all, this newfound togetherness is something they have chosen for themselves, which is maybe the part that matters most.

* * *

Natasha comes back from a mission dripping in another woman's blood, and she goes first to Bruce's room.

"There's a First Aid Kit under your sink," she tells him, and immediately begins stripping off her uniform, damp and tacky with blood. In Bruce's shower, the water runs off her body pink, collects red around the drain.

Bruce curses when he sees her, looks like he's a second away from crossing himself as he watches blood rinse off her back and drip from the slice in her thigh. "Jesus, Nat, what happened?"

"Word on the street," she winces, nudging her bleeding thigh under the spray, "is that the Black Widow bleeds. Some upstart wanted to see for herself that it was true."

"Is she...?"

"Dead. I don't often give those who try and kill me another chance to try again."

There are a lot of things she expects Bruce to say in response to that. Anything from quiet disapproval at her willingness to kill to pointing out the second chance she gave him. He doesn't say any of those things. Instead, he looks at her with steady brown eyes and asks, "Are you going to let me take a look at that gash or are you going to see how much the Black Widow can bleed?"

Natasha laughs, turns the shower off, and perches in front of Bruce. "Are you going to say anything?" she asks. "Give me the whole murder is wrong and our actions define us spiel?"

"No." Bruce cleans out the wound, careful hands gentle on her skin. "I doubt I'll ever feel the need to tell you either of those things. I may be a lot of unfortunate things, Natasha, but I don't think I'm a hypocrite."

"It's different," Natasha says, even though she's not so sure it is. Bruce is an awful lot like her, broken and terrible in so many of the same ways. It was, after all, the man hiding his monster that she had been drawn to first of all.

"Yes," Bruce agrees. She wishes he would look up at her so she could see what he's thinking, but his eyes are intent on his work. "It's different because I made my monster, but somebody else made yours. You're responsible for what you make, but you're not the one who made yourself this way. You're trying to make yourself into something new."

"That doesn't absolve me. It's still my monster."

Bruce finally looks up at her, and his eyes flash green. "Maybe I like that about you."

Natasha is careful not to nudge his hands when she leans down to kiss him.

* * *

Bruce, on no uncertain terms, is no longer an Avenger. Bruce is, on significantly less certain terms, now her boyfriend. Natasha thinks that's what he is, at least. Boyfriend doesn't seem like the type of word that has a place in the vocabularies of people like them.

Bruce is, however, more than happy to take up shop in the empty labs in the new Avengers facility, which means there's an apartment for him down the hall from hers. It's good this way. Neither of them are ready to share their space, but all the same, Natasha doesn't want Bruce too far away. Everybody else is pleased to have a scientist in residence too; Bruce is no engineer, but he's more than qualified to make basic repairs to Sam's wings and outfit Rhodey's suit with brand new homegrown explosives. Bruce is obviously happier consulting from the lab then he ever had been on the field, and it only takes a few weeks before he smiles at easily at her new team as he had their old.

In short, Bruce fits.

She tells him as much a month after they'd finished wading through their reconciliation. She's curled up on the couch he'd brought down to his lab just for her, watching as Bruce closed down a video conference with Helen Cho and saved his notes, and as Wanda thanked him for his time and left the lab.

"Sorry?" Bruce asks, still distracted by whatever problem he's working through. He, Helen, and Wanda had been doing their best to map Wanda's powers and had been getting nowhere. It was the kind of biophysics problem Natasha didn't need to understand to know that it was exactly what Bruce lived for.

"You fit well here," Natasha repeats, bemused.

"With your team?" Bruce stops and turns to look at her. His glasses are slipping down his nose, so Natasha climbs up to pull them off and fold them up.

Natasha nods. "It's nice."

"Yeah," Bruce looks up at her and fits a hand around the curl of her hipbone. "It is."

"Maybe there is a place in the world for you after all."

"Careful, Natasha. It sounds like you're getting soft," Bruce smiles at her. He looks happy here, as soft as he's accusing her of being. It's a good look on him.

"Never."

Bruce just keeps grinning at her, his eyes crinkling and the lines around his mouth deepening. "Want to make burritos and watch a nature documentary?"

"Mmmm," Natasha sighs, working her fingers into his hair and walking her fingertips along his scalp. "Okay."

Bruce laughs. "Tell me again how you're not getting soft?"

"I have four guns hidden on me, above the waist," Natasha says blankly, and tries to tell herself she doesn't like the idea of this imagined softness.

"Point taken."

She pulls at one of Bruce's hands and he rises obligingly enough, making some noise about saving his work. He finishes quickly and she tugs him out of his lab. Burritos aren't going to make themselves, and Natasha sure as hell isn't making them either.

Being soft, she thinks, sitting at kitchen table in Bruce's quarters, maybe isn't so bad. Maybe this, watching a man she might love cook beans and rice while she wears his overlarge college sweatshirt and tells him about the movie she and Wanda just saw, is what she's been after all along. Clint has his family and his farm and Tony has his life in Malibu and Thor has a whole world, but Natasha has this, a man who even she couldn't hurt who would cook her dinner while he sang along with the radio, and a team to lead.

It's starting to feel dangerously like home.

fin.

* * *

if you ever want to talk brucenat at any time hit me up on tumblr, where I'm brucebannur.

any feedback of any kind on this work is welcome and will be greatly appreciated.


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